PaaS: The Types and Characteristics

Jan 31
07:00

2013

YancyMarry

YancyMarry

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PaaS, also referred to as Platform as a Service is an important category of cloud computing that enterprises worldwide should adopt. The PaaS provides an organization with a computing platform as well as a solution track; therefore it is categorized under the service models of cloud computing.

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PaaS,PaaS: The Types and Characteristics Articles also referred to as Platform as a Service is an important category of cloud computing that enterprises worldwide should adopt. The PaaS provides an organization with a computing platform as well as a solution track; therefore it is categorized under the service models of cloud computing. In PaaS, it is the consumer who monitors the libraries and tools for creating software that will assist the enterprise to deploy devices and applications and also configure their settings. The reason why PaaS is preferred by business units over the world is that help in reducing the complexities and costs involved in purchasing and management of software and hardware for mobilization of profits. Let us take a look at the types of PaaS available and their chief characteristics:

Types of Platforms as a Service:

1. Standalone Development Environments – These types of PaaS environments do not take into consideration the licensing, technical, and financial dependencies that the SaaS web services and applications show. These are more of a generalized development framework.

2. Application Delivery only Environments – This type of PaaS framework does not include capabilities such as development, testing, and debugging. These capabilities can however be accessed by users of Platforms as a Service when they are offline using plugins such as Eclipse. All the services provided under this category focus on features such as on demand scalability and security.

3. Open Platform as a Service – This framework of PaaS does not support hosting; it can rather be used as an open source software that allows all developers using the PaaS services to run apps. AppScale is an example of software that developers use while deploying applications made especially for the Google App Engine. These types of software provide datastore access from NoSQL and standard SQL databases. The open platforms allow developers to use any database, their choice of programming language, any server, and also any OS platform for deploying in the mobile apps.

Chief Characteristics of Platforms as a Service:

1. Multitenant Architecture – The offerings of PaaS support the use of mobile apps by concurrent users. They provide features such as scalability, concurrency management, security, and fail over. The multitenant architecture of PaaS helps in establishing a ‘trust relationship’ between all users in the fields of access, security, navigation history, source code distributions, interaction history, app usage, and user profiles.

2. Integration with Databases and Web Services – The REST and SOAP interfaces that PaaS offerings support allow composing multiple web services like mashups. At the same time, PaaS allows the creation of re-use services and databases which are maintained within private networks. The PaaS tools are such that they also support the user relationships with their devices, thus helping in the coordination of databases, web services, and networks.

3. Support for Team Collaboration Development – The ability of forming and sharing codes with pre defined and ad hoc distributed teams is the chief reason why PaaS services are preferred by enterprises worldwide. The PaaS features allow scheduling, and preparing of teams, objectives, roles, and responsibilities for updating, defining, and tracking of access rights.

Platforms as a Service offer features for various aspects within an enterprise including app design, app testing, app deployment, web service integration, team collaboration, database integration, state management, app instrumentation, and app versioning. This is why the developer community finds the services of PaaS useful.